Bone taint in beef
Hello everyone. I am new to this network and I look forward to contributing and getting advice regarding bone taint in beef. I work at a beef abattoir and deboning plant as a food technologist. I have been in the food industry for more than 11 years and have been in the canning of fruits and vegetables, olives and olive oil production, beef slaughter & deboning and cooked meats. We are experiencing bone taint issues at the slaughter house I am currently working and I have enrolled for a part time MSc study with a local university to try and figure out how I can mitigate this bone taint. So I Iook forward to working with you all.
I have been measuring the temp & pH drop of our carcasses for some time and the pH curve has been peculiar. From literature I found the pH should typically start higher than 6 and gradually drop to less than 6 over the chilling period. My findings were somewhat the opposite. I picked up a gradual increase in pH.
Does anyone have a typical pH and temp graph for beef chilling or reference study I can refer to? Any ideas of why I could be recording the gradual increase in pH instead of the expected gradual drop?
There are a few factors which can cause 'bone taint', it would be helpful to know what the processing and pre-slaughter conditions are. For example, do you hot bone? Are the cattle grass or grain fed? What is the ultimate pH for the carcases? Enterobacteriacae seem to be the culprits, and depending on pH and temperature produce a number of ketones and ethanol in abundance compared to non-spoiled bone-in cuts of dry cured ham- I would suggest they would have similar effects in beef. Have a look at this paper: "Microbial populations and volatile compounds in the ‘bone taint’ spoilage of dry cured ham (Garcia et al, 2000)". Hope this helps.
I have been measuring the temp & pH drop of our carcasses for some time and the pH curve has been peculiar. From literature I found the pH should typically start higher than 6 and gradually drop to less than 6 over the chilling period. My findings were somewhat the opposite. I picked up a gradual increase in pH.
Does anyone have a typical pH and temp graph for beef chilling or reference study I can refer to? Any ideas of why I could be recording the gradual increase in pH instead of the expected gradual drop?
Ultimate pH and the onset of rigor should happen at a pH of about 5.7, which means most likely the beef carcases have run out of glycogen. Have a look at pre-slaughter conditions then: stress, feed, etc